Over the last five years, Xponent has been helping business owners to grow their companies. We’ve used traditional and digital marketing strategies to find new markets or penetrate existing markets to deliver solid revenue growth.
This article gives you an inside scoop on how to identify and avoid the most common mistake we see business owners making when they do marketing.
In the article, we will refer to a fictitious business as a conceptual case study, but we assure you that this story is based on true events. This hypothetical company is Sparkies Components Engineering, which manufactures components used in electrical projects. They sell their products in higher volumes to distributors, agents and large electrical contracting businesses.
For those of you skimming to see if it’s worth reading the article, here is the answer:
Marketing Fails Because There is No Clear Plan In Place
More often than not, we are called in to provide design or marketing work, only to find that there is no clear plan for why the communications are being designed. These callers typically ask for a website, brochures and business cards, but when you ask them questions like: “Who is your target audience?” or “How do you plan to distribute the materials?” they look at us as if the answers should be obvious.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In the game of marketing, you are competing not only with your competitors but with all companies and media, competing for your audience’s attention. If we had an infinite budget, we could market any product or service to many people. If only we had an infinite budget.
In the real world, where marketing budgets are very finite, we often have huge expectations of our marketing activities, not realising that we need to compete with massive budgets and audiences with shorter attention spans than ever before. Good marketing uses the smallest possible budget to achieve the greatest return on investment. You won’t achieve that without a properly implemented marketing plan.
Hypothetical Starts
The owner of Sparkies Components Engineering, Daniel Pembrook, is on his way to work. He’s feeling pretty good because they just got the sales figures in, and it seems like they hit their 7% growth rate for the year. He plans to celebrate with his wife for dinner at a trendy restaurant. As he walks into the office, his sales manager says: “Good Morning, Daniel. Check your email when you have a minute. It seems like Elecompo just launched a new website.”
Daniel walked into his office after some rushed “hello’s”. He sits down at his desk and Googles his website. Their domain was not listed on the first page! This is not good. When he finally found his site, he realised they hadn’t updated it in more than seven years. He has to do something about this ASAP!
Daniel’s cousin built their first website, so he decided to give her a call. She’s a top web designer who works at a premiere design company. He asks his cousin to help him update their website, and over the next few weeks, she does an admirable job of updating the look and feel of the website. The only problem is that after launching the new website, they haven’t seen a significant increase in sales.
Hypothetical Ends
Daniel reacted to what his competitors were doing instead of focusing on what his business needed to achieve. It’s not that he failed at building a website, but in some ways, he is missing the forest for the trees. The goal wasn’t to have a great website. The goal is to generate sales.
The new website might increase the market’s perception of their business, but they gained nothing from doing the work. Worst of all, that website will remain untouched for the next seven years, which could mean Daniel wasted a great sales tool. What a pity 🙁
Follow us on Daniel Pembrook’s marketing journey. This article is the first part of a series that tells the story of Daniel Pembrook.
Bydrae offers branding and marketing workshops that help business owners solve these issues by
- setting attainable marketing goals;
- defining a market that is worth targeting;
- developing a key message that will connect with your audience on an emotional level;
- selecting the proper channels and touch points to reach your audience and;
- building and maintaining a world-class lead-capturing website.
Workshops can be conducted in person or via video conference. Book your marketing workshop by reaching out to us via our website.
